JRHAWK9's 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme

1977 Cutlass Supreme

About this Current Vehicle:

I bought this car in 1989 when I was a junior in highschool with a blown Olds 260 V8 for $300. A friend and I then put a '73 Pontiac 400 in it from what was our family car, a 1973 Grand Am. I have put many hours into it never thinking it would ever turn out the way that it did...it's far from perfect, but a ton better than I ever could have dreamed of. It has new rear quarters, new doors, new rear bumper, new trunk lid, all the interior (dash included) with the exception of the front buckets and console, came out of a 1976 Cutlass Supreme Brougham in which I bought for only $20!! All the original red interior was gutted and all the rust holes were patched with steel plates that my dad got from work and which I welded in. Then I placed fiberglass over the welds to protect it from the weather. The car was painted the day I graduated from HS, which was Friday, June 8th of 1990 and has been holding up ever since. I continued to improve it as time went on and around 1995 or so I decided to install a stereo system. In 1996 I received my first car show trophy with it at Allouezfest's Precious Metals Car Show, which sees around 500-700 cars, so I was pretty happy, until I hit a deer with it a few months later and it stayed in storage for awhile because I was in college and could not afford to do anything with it. In 2002 I decided it sat long enough and pulled it out of storage and began to fix it. There was a total of around $2000 damage done, but luckily I had good collectors insurance that covered all of it. The following pictures represent how it looks like today, as I still have the car.

I also included a few pictures of when I was in the process of working on it. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of what the car looked like before I started with it, but you can probably get a good idea from the pictures that it wasn't in the best of shape. Keep in mind that I was only 17 years old or so at the time I was restoring it, so I wasn't exactly up to snuff on the exact 'right' way to do some things and in what order to do them in. I did take an auto body class at a local tech school when I was a junior in high school for a month that got me started, but that's all the experience I had in conjunction with taking on this project. I definitely would have done some things a bit differently now looking back at it....but, hey, I was just a 17 year old kid giving myself something to do and keeping myself out of trouble :-)